Improving the quality of education in Palestine through e-learning and ICT: the bottom-up approach for a sustainable pedagogy

SPEP (Support to Palestinian Education Programme) is a project funded by the Italian Cooperation, managed by UNDP "United Nations Development Programme- and involving the Palestinian Ministry of Education and Higher Education (MoEHE), 24 public schools with different grades, 4 local Universities (3 in West Bank and 1 in Gaza Strip) and relative Districts and the University of Bologna. Its aim is to support the capacity of the school for self-improvement developing a process where the school becomes able to self-evaluate itself in terms of quality of education (learning and teaching), management and leadership, environment, networking, relation with parents and community, continuing professional development of teachers and principals. Each schools develops its improvement plan with specific action plans, target and tasks, each with clearly identified success criteria in order to evaluate results. Local Universities, coordinating with the MoEHE, work each with 6 schools visiting them regularly, helping in identifying standards and targets for the quality of education and in planning the improvement, training teachers in different areas, monitoring, advising and reviewing. The main concept for the SPEP intervention is that of a comprehensive developmental process focusing the school itself and leading to school growth and improvement. The University of Bologna, Department of Education, has a technical advisory role in the ICT component supporting and working together with Palestinian Universities and schools and coordinating with UNDP and MoEHE. The University of Bologna’s role is to implement the ICT knowledge and a critical practice in the schools providing relevant pedagogical models of the use of ICT, tools (software, videogames, learning objects) and methodologies, orientation, material, best practices, and is monitoring the pedagogical experimentation of the use of ICT in the daily didactic (in classroom) with a bottom-up approach respecting schools, teachers and students within the Palestinian context, using technologies and pedagogical/didactical models sustainable: stressing therefore the use of technologies with a low economical impact and open to a variety of cultural interpretation. The bottom up approach aims to innovate the pedagogy in the classroom, via the integration of ICT in the teacher’s practice using both our general pedagogical models and models locally experimented in a critical and original way (compared to the traditional know-how): in this approach it is important to help teachers to reflect and elaborate on their own performances and produce as a result learning material to be newly utilized in their contexts.